Jazz and Male Blackness: The Politics of Sociability in South Central Los Angeles

Abstract

This essay focuses on the jazz jam sessions of the World Stage—a storefront workshop and performance space in Leimert Park, South Central Los Angeles, founded in 1992 by poet Kamau Daaood and legendary drummer Billy Higgins. It draws on ethnographic data collected over 26 months of continuous observant participation as a performer and ethnographer starting January 1996. I argue that Leimert's coexisting and conflicting social perspectives (a) can be grasped through the social practices and musical performances centered on the weekly jam sessions; (b) reveal norms according to which public spaces and the virtuous society should operate; (c) suggest internal dilemmas black communities experience as they confront the effects of imposed marginalization. Leimert's musical performances and the social contexts within which they take place are necessarily embedded in—and in critical dialogue with—the historical structures of discrimination, and the class, generational, and gender tensions among blacks living in the inner city.

Notes

I respectfully dedicate this essay to the living beautiful spirits of Billy Higgins and Juno Se Mama Lewis.

1. Throughout this essay, I will be employing the ethnographic present tense. This is not to diminish the time‐specific quality of the research I conducted between 1996 and 1998. Rather, my intention is to preserve that very specificity and give the reader a sense of the social processes that were taking place in Leimert Park during that period. Many significant changes have materialized since. Billy Higgins and Juno Se Mama Lewis, among others, have died. Fifth Street Dick's, a café and jazz club right around the corner from the World Stage, owned and run by Richard Fulton, closed shortly after Fulton's death. For an analysis of ethnography and how it represents reality and time, see, for example, Fabian.

2. This characterization is not exclusive to blacks who live in the area. The Los Angeles Times has described Leimert Park as “a center for African American culture in Los Angeles” that “has blossomed in recent years” (Hong B3). See also Williams, who presents the area in similar terms.

3. Males dominate the jam sessions at the World Stage. A few women participate, usually as singers. The antipathy that instrumentalists often express toward singers, however, has less to do with the fact that the singers are women than with the fact that singers usually request odd keys in which they want to perform.

4. I utilize the word “amateur” to differentiate from “professional.” The amateurs at the World Stage are not able to make a living from music. But this distinction does not necessarily describe amateurs' musical abilities or their performance experience. While most of the amateurs who play at the World Stage are conscious of their technical deficiencies, especially when compared to established musicians, they have extensive experience of playing, not only at the Stage, but also in various restaurants, cafes, clubs, and hotels in Los Angeles, in other cities of the United States, and occasionally abroad.

5. “The Coltrane Quartet...was the most influential band of the post‐war period. It was the one group that amalgamated all the threads that had gone into creation of Black music up to that point and did so in a musical way, based on the traditions of the great jazz heritage....The unique tone and the hypnotic mood that John Coltrane established the minute he started to play have become the norm” (Wilmer 31–32).

6. For a thorough analysis of the relation between Coltrane's spirituality and the structure of his compositions and use of musical techniques, see Porter. Among other convincing and creative examples of the spiritual‐technical connections in Coltrane's work, Porter juxtaposes the words in Coltrane's poem “A Love Supreme,” which appears in the homologous disc's liner notes, with Coltrane's solo in “Psalm,” the last song of the disc. “A comparison of the poem with Coltrane's improvisation reveals that his saxophone solo is a wordless ‘recitation,’ if you will, of the words of the poem, beginning with the title ‘A Love Supreme.’” (244).

7. See, for example, Tucker.

8. Such an argument can be extrapolated from Brown. For a historical analysis of black masculinity focusing on Charles Mingus, see Rustin.

. [9]Similarly, bell hooks sees the blues as one of the few outlets for non‐patriarchal forms of black male expression of emotions, in which vulnerability and sensitivity are seen as valued aspects of artistic performance.

10. See, for example, Vargas.

11. Reaching out to hip hop culture constituted an important part of the work of local poet (and former professor at California State University, Northridge) Kamau Daaood. At the time of my research, Daaood was in his late forties. He had shaped his art in the Underground Musicians and Artists Association (UGMA), made up not only of poets, but also musicians and visual artists, part of a fertile black arts movement that followed the Watts rebellions of 1965. Poets Wanda Coleman, Odie Hawkins, Eric Priestly, K. Curtis Lyle, Quincy Troupe, Emory Evans, and Ojenke, to name a few, participated in this group and most took part in the work of the Watts Writers' Workshop in the late 1960s as well. Jazz pianist Horace Tapscott and his “Pan‐Afrikan Peoples Arkestra” (influenced by Sun Ra's “Solar Arkestra”) both inspired and participated in this cultural movement (see Tapscott).

12. See, for example, Malcolm X.

13. Recorded in Los Angeles in 1965, Kulu Se Mama had an unusual personnel roster: aside from his regular rhythm section of pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones, Coltrane added drummer Frank Butler, Pharoah Sanders on tenor saxophone, Donald Garrett on bass clarinet and bass, and the percussion and vocals of Juno Lewis—all playing simultaneously. A drawing of Juno and a transcription of “Kulu Se Mama (Juno Se Mama),” his poem that gave the record its title, illustrate the inside cover of the original LP. The date, location, and substance of the recording are no accident. The radical experimental character of Kulu Se Mama, with its iconoclastic stances toward bebop's usual time, harmony, and improvisations, can be readily associated with the post‐uprising cultural climate that included, among others, the no‐less‐radical experiments undertaken in Watts by local poets and musicians. Coltrane's innovative approach to rhythm and his obvious search for greater freedom in tonality can be contextualized, and indeed acquire further meaning, within the effervescent political and artistic expressions of the mid‐1960s. I thank George Lipsitz for pointing out that Frank Kofsky made a similar argument in his Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music.

14. On Afrological music and improvisation, see Lewis.

15. This, of course, is only part of the Nation of Islam's complex messages. For articles on the organization's outlooks, see Playthell and also Gates. Both articles seem to agree that the Nation of Islam's main support—if not its moral principles—comes from middle‐class blacks. “Farrakhan's level of support among black Americans is vigorously debated. If you gauge his followers by the number who regularly attend mosques affiliated with the Nation of Islam and eschew lima beans and corn bread, they are not very numerous. Estimates range from twenty thousand to ten times that. On the other hand, if you go by the number of people who consider him a legitimate voice of black protest, then ranks are much higher. (In a recent poll, more than half the blacks surveyed reported a favorable impression of him.) The [Million Man] march was inspired by the Muslims but not populated by them. Farrakhan knows that the men who came to the march were not his religious followers. They tended to be middle class and college‐educated and Christian. Farrakhan is convinced that those men came to a ‘march called by a man who is considered radical, extremist, anti‐Semitic, anti‐white’ because of a yearning ‘to connect with the masses’” (Gates 128).

16. According to the Holy Qur’an and many Islamic scholars, the religion of Al‐Islam, as it is practiced today by an estimated one billion people, including members of a dozen mosques in South Central, was revealed to and systematized by Prophet Muhammad in Arabia about 1,400 years ago. Al‐Islam is based on the Sunnah (Way) of the Prophet Ibn Abdullah, believed to be the last Messenger of Allah. The Nation of Islam, on the other hand, is a US phenomenon. It started in 1930 in Detroit, Michigan, founded by Wali Fard Muhammad, also known as W. D. Fard. Fard taught Elijah Poole, who later changed his name to Elijah Muhammad, and made him into his spokesman and representative.

17. A similar point, albeit made in a more general manner, can be extracted from Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness.

18. For example, in April of 1997, a group of approximately 25 small‐business owners and neighborhood residents rallied against the city's intention to install additional parking meters in the area. “They liken the parking meters scheduled to crop up in two city‐owned lots, to weeds that could destroy their cultural garden spot” (Hong B3). The photograph that accompanied the article showed a mix of shop owners, artists, and residents carrying large signs expressing their demands. There were persons wearing African and Eastern clothes, there were African drums being played, and there were those wearing standard clothing.

19. Cohen, especially ch. 2.

20. For a historical analysis of how the 1920s' northern urban black middle class engaged in policing practices as it focused on the migrating working class, and especially on young black working‐class women coming from the south, see Carby.